Local band Damn the Moon was born out of a meeting at a music festival. It was a straightforward connection: Lead guitarist Mike Bator and songwriter/guitarist Michael Ryan were volunteering locally, met, chatted and soon after a band formed. Bringing in Alex Read on bass, the trio of Damn the Moon dig into singer-songwriter roots rock to more stretched out and heavier sounds.
Damn the Moon will perform Saturday at Cat Care, a local cat adoption and animal shelter celebrating a move and grand opening in Bodo Industrial Park.
If you go
WHAT: Damn the Moon performs rock, blues, folk
WHEN: 12:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Cat Care, 72 Suttle St., Unit A in Bodo Industrial Park
TICKETS: Free
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.catcaredurango.org
“We met at one of the iAM MUSIC festivals,” Ryan said. “We ran into each other, and it was like a brief introduction; we talked, we said something about music, and we should play together sometime. Then fast forward, we connected, and there’s been no looking back. It’s been awesome.”
Both Ryan and Bator picked up the guitar at age 18. Bator spent years “learning the language” of music and Ryan shelved his guitar when he was younger as life got in the way. Picking it up decades later, playing became just as therapeutic as it is fun.
“I was never in any bands, I never took any music lessons, I’ve never done any of that,” Ryan said. “It was basically just my way to deal with life, to strum chords and then write words and put them together.”
That strum chords and write words combination has resulted in a load of original songs. Ryan has always considered himself a songwriter, first getting into it in a past duo when he’d write the music, his former partner contributing lyrics. When that first partner split, Ryan then kicked into gear on writing both melody and words, the result being a fistful – and then some – of tunes. This allowed Damn the Moon to skip the learning other people’s songs step most bands start with, allowing them to play original music right from the get-go. Ryan writes a song on the acoustic, Bator then adds in rock fills.
“We’ve never done any cover songs, it’s always been original,” Ryan said. “We just kind of clicked. I brought in some songs, and then Bator did his thing. I was like, ‘damn.’”
“For me, he writes these sort of timeless songs that I can really connect to in many ways throughout my own life,” Bator said. “So it makes it very easy for me to put parts to it, because I can feel a lot of these songs.”
There’s a singer-songwriter vibe that comes from Ryan’s personal and emotional lyrics and his acoustic guitar, but with Bator’s more rock ’n’ roll fills and Read’s backing bass, the sound is much thicker than folk-rock offerings. There are offerings of 21st century modern-rock with a blues vibe, a jam feel with Bator’s stretched-out solos – all with a thick folk twist. A run of performing at Durango Coffee Co. (a gig that will likely pick back up down the road) can give the music a coffeehouse feel, but it’s more than that.
The genre ambiguity is something the band revels in: There’s something about a band that celebrates multiple sounds in their stash of songs, as it’s a way to attract a variety of listeners while keeping those listeners guessing.
“We’re hard to define; we’re kind of all over the place,” Ryan said. “We’ve got a lot of songs, and some of them are kind of on the soft and pretty side. We’ve got a few that are on the harder rock side, and then we’ve got everything that kind of falls in between.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
